Chu , Pey-Yi The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 576 Chu, Pey-Yi. The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2020. viii + 288 pp. Maps. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.£52.00: $75.00. ‘Permafrost’, we learn from Pey-Yi Chu’s monograph, was not permanent, nor was it frost. The book analyses competing ways of understanding the phenomenon of ‘frozen earth’ (the author’s neutral term), how these evolved in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, and their reception in North America. Chu argues that the ways people have understood the phenomenon have depended on why they were interested in frozen earth. When the tsarist and Soviet authorities were settling and developing northern and eastern Siberia, they needed to build infrastructure: roads, railways, buildings, etc. But, frozen earth posed serious problems, such as ‘heaving’ (puchenie): the ground near the surface became swollen in cold months as moisture froze and subsided in warmer months as it thawed. A further problem was that buildings on frozen earth generated heat, which thawed the earth underneath, causing it to subside and the buildings to deform, crack and sink. Unfortunately, one building so affected was the NKVD headquarters in Iakutsk. For engineers, therefore, frozen earth was a physical structure to be dealt with. On the other hand, scientists seeking more abstract understandings of its origins and distribution turned attention to frozen earth as a condition or process arising from the distribution and flows of heat in the planet. This ‘systems thinking’ approach was consistent with the Russian scientific innovation in soil science that emphasized soils as products of interaction between different parts of the environment, including climate and geology. To historicize these competing conceptualizations of frozen earth, the author uses the analogy of the lifecycle of a butterfly, from egg, through lava and pupa, to adult. The embryonic stage is considered in chapter one: Mapping. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, explorers and scientists analysed the frozen earth they found in Siberia from the perspectives of climatology, geology and ice-age theory. Men such as Baltic Germans Karl Ernst von Baer and Alexander von Middendorff initiated the dialectic between understanding frozen earth as part of the earth’s system or as a physical structure. The second chapter takes us to the larval stage. It considers frozen earth from the perspective of building, using the Trans-Siberian Railway and the AmurIakutiia highway as case studies. The tsarist and Soviet engineers treated the frozen earth they were building on as a structure. This brings us to the pupal stage, discussed in chapters three (Defining) and four (Adapting). The key figure is Mikhail Sumgin. A former Socialist Revolutionary with scientific experience in Russia’s far east, he published a book in 1927 that defined frozen earth as an aggregate physical structure of REVIEWS 577 both soil and rock that had a negative temperature and was frozen continuously for at least two years. He called it ‘vechnaia merzlota’. The alternative systems approach was advanced by Sergei Parkhomenko. He explained frozen earth as a climate-induced geological process in which ice was central and he questioned Sumgin’s concept of ‘eternal’ (vechnaia) in the context of geological time. The struggle between the two was intellectual, personal and institutional. Sumgin’s conception prevailed at the time, because it met the Soviet regime’s need for an understanding relevant to engineers ‘conquering nature’ to build socialism and it resonated with Bolshevik political culture. In the adult stage, discussed in chapter five, there were two significant developments. During and after the Second World War, North Americans who needed an understanding of frozen earth for construction in Alaska and Canada drew on Soviet work, in particular that of Sumgin. Vechnaia merzlota was translated, inaccurately, as ‘permafrost’, a term which has become eternally frozen in the Anglophone lexicography. This is doubly unfortunate since, after Sumgin’s death in 1942, Soviet scientists, and their American counterparts, revived the more sophisticated systems approach, rendering ‘permafrost’ a mistranslation of an contested theory. Chu’s analysis shows sensitivity to language, both in the Russians’ originals and the Americans’ translations. The latter improved after they hired Inna...